## The API Security Gap Widens: How Akto Raised $4.5M to Tackle Enterprise Data Vulnerabilities

The infrastructure of modern applications relies heavily on APIs, yet security teams remain perpetually underprepared for emerging threats. With API attack traffic surging 700% year-over-year and industry analysts warning that API abuses will become the dominant attack vector by 2022, enterprises face an urgent crisis. The recent collapse of customer trust following high-profile breaches—such as the Optus data exposure caused by unprotected API endpoints—underscores the dire need for faster, more intelligent security solutions.

### A Platform Built for Speed, Not Complexity

Akto, the world's first instant-deployment API security platform, has just closed a $4.5M seed funding round spearheaded by Accel India, with backing from notable angel investors including Akshay Kothari (co-founder and COO of Notion), Renaud Deraison (co-founder Tenable), and Milin Desai (CEO of Sentry). The funding validates an emerging thesis: traditional API security tools are too slow and generate excessive false positives, creating friction rather than enabling security teams.

Co-founders Ankita Gupta and Ankush Jain launched Akto in January 2022 after observing a critical market gap. They conducted extensive interviews with over 200 security engineers worldwide before writing a single line of code. Their insight was straightforward yet powerful—existing solutions require months to evaluate and deploy, rendering them impractical in fast-moving development environments.

### How Akto Delivers Visibility in Minutes, Not Months

The platform distinguishes itself through three core capabilities. First, it provides instant API inventory generation by mirroring live traffic from cloud infrastructure (AWS, GCP, etc.), eliminating the manual enumeration process that typically consumes weeks. Second, it identifies sensitive data exposure patterns—Akto has already surfaced over 100 incidents involving exposed credit card information across its customer base. Third, it continuously tests for business logic vulnerabilities including authentication bypasses and authorization flaws directly within CI/CD pipelines.

The deployment footprint is remarkably lean: zero manual configuration required, full operational status within 60 seconds. To date, Akto has cataloged more than 100,000 APIs for enterprise customers globally, discovering over 1,000 broken authentication vulnerabilities through its AI-powered testing module.

### Technology That Scales Without Performance Degradation

Ankush Jain, drawing on a decade of big data infrastructure experience at Morgan Stanley and CleverTap, architected the platform to process enterprise-scale traffic (up to 10 billion requests daily) with negligible latency impact. The system employs machine learning to contextualize API behavior patterns, reducing the false positive rates that plague competing solutions.

Beyond the core platform, Akto released AKTO MINI, a free Chrome browser extension that generates quick API inventories and detects personally identifiable information (PII) leaks without requiring platform deployment. The extension has already generated traction among individual developers and security practitioners seeking immediate visibility.

### What Comes Next

The new capital will accelerate platform expansion across the DevSecOps ecosystem—deeper integrations with CI/CD tooling, enhanced business logic test coverage, and strengthened machine learning capabilities for threat detection. The founder's explicit vision targets the 30 million developers and security teams worldwide, enabling them to achieve API security hardening in under 60 seconds.

For enterprises watching their threat surface expand through API proliferation, Akto represents a paradigm shift: security that doesn't compromise development velocity.